Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension: Is there an effect?

This paper is a contribution to the studies conducted for investigating the relationship between text linguistic signals and reading comprehension. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that discourse markers facilitate reading comprehension. The specific question addressed is whether the presence of discourse markers facilitates reading comprehension at a global level (i.e., at the discourse level). Two groups of L2 learners were given a text followed by multiple choice comprehension questions. One group was given the actual text, while the other group was given the same text with discourse markers removed. The results indicated that there were no differences in the performance of the two groups. The study concluded that presence or absence of discourse markers may have no effect on the overall representation of coherent information needed for reading comprehension.